The other Staff, lets call him Sgt. Jay, was from Tennessee. He had a lot more time in service than I, but my date of rank was one day earlier than his so like Gen. Haig when Reagan was shot, I was in charge. My command position was a little shaky, what with my subordinate carrying the same number of stripes as me and only one day rank seniority separating us. Uneasy is the head that wears the crown. In my effort to recover morning reports, I would go to the regimental HQ of the unit I needed to contact or occasionally down to battalion, get in touch with the Sgt. Major and he took it from there. I would hang around the HQ till the reports were rounded up and delivered. Sgt. Jay however would go down to company level, often while they were under fire. I ask him not to do that several times but to no avail. There was no point in getting ones ass shot off because of a missing piece of paper. We separately would motor across the rear of the line for 2 or 3 days then meet at a designated place and one of us would take the total haul of reports back to Teague and turn them over to the Cpl. for transport to Tokyo. We would pick up a new delinquent list and then back to a designated meeting place, split the list and be on our separate way in search of the missing reports. I was at a regimental HQ waiting for them to round up the missing paper one day when a First Lt. ask me if I was there looking for morning reports. He spotted me because of the 8th Army patch on my fatigues, two white dumbbells on a field of red. When I told him I was, he asked me if the other crazy son of a bitch was dead. I finally figured out he was talking about Sgt. Jay It seems Jay had accosted the Lt. in his fox hole, while the company was under fire, stating he was from 8th Army HQ, and the company was delinquent in its morning reports. The company had lost its commander, a captain, to a bad wound earlier in the day and the Lt. was in command. He said he thought seriously about shooting Sgt. Jay on the spot. I don’t know how Jay did it but he always looked like he just stepped out of a band box while the rest of us looked like Bill Malden cartoons. I went three months that winter with out a shower, just a quick wipe down with water heated in the helmet. We called that a – well never mind.
We kept the teen age Korean Interpreter who was with us in the truck when we bugged out of Seoul in December, even though we suspected he was responsible for the crab infestation. He had been raised in a Christian Orphanage, and his English, while stilted, was excellent. His vocabulary was amazing. I occasionally had to stopped him and ask him to break down the meaning of a word he had used. Sgt Jay hated this particular guy because, to quote him, “Shit, you can’t understand a fucking thing the silly bastard says. He might as well be speakn Chinee.” Jay had a vocabulary that measured in the hundreds. If you spoke Pidgin English with a heavy Korean accent you were Jay's kind of interpreter.
We had an interpreter pool of 4 Korean Nationals so when we came back to Teague from the lines, we usually changed. This was to give them time with their families and take care of personal affairs. We took the next one in line. I got back to Teague after a bad trip to the north and before I got out of the Jeep, the young Christian Interpreter met me, saying, “Sir! Sir! Sergeant Jay has discharged me from my position. I have been working in the mess hall pending your return.” Of course I hired him back on the spot. Jay had fired him somewhere way to the north and the kid had got back to Teague on his own some how. When I asked Jay about why he fired the kid, he said, “He’s a god damn queer. He hit on me while we were up near the line.” Jay was a little homophobic. It took awhile but I finally got to the bottom of what took place. The kid, vary aware of Jay's animosity said to him “Sgt. Jay, you must learn to love me.” Jay took this as a pass and fired him on the spot. A strong Christian background can be a handicap when dealing with some Americans.
Scrounging for morning reports lasted till spring when establishment of reasonable communications ended the need. Our main unit began to show up from Japan and we resumed our mission. Another unit with the same mission as ours joined us from Governors Island, NY. Unfortunately, they did not have an Authorized Strength guy. I was assigned 4 very pissed off, recalled untrained reservists as a crew. We finally got the files in good reporting shape. From that point I spent half my time proving the reports we submitted. “There must be some mistake; I’m sure my slot as Lt. Col is authorized”. I was threatened and offered bribes in one form or another, often to ‘create’ a Col. Slot for good old Lt. Col Jones, a real swell guy. A couple of Generals put me under some pressure. “Give me that in writing and sign it.”, I use to tell them. I held my ground and hope the guy who replaced me did the same.
The Motor Sergeant was a genius. The Jeeps we drove to the lines never failed. How he kept all the vehicles in such good working order by himself always amazed me. After we got established in Teague, they assigned him four mechanics to supervise and train in Army ways. The motor pool office was in a permanent building rather than a trailer or tent. I often stopped by his office because he always had coffee brewing and I liked spending time with him. He complained a lot about having nothing to do because the mechanics he had were really good. He had been in the used car business back in Kentucky and use to say he missed “wheeling and dealing” as much or more that he missed his wife.
He had his wife send him 50 cheap watches and went into the used watch business. A few of his clients were GI’s but most were Korean Nationals. At that time the official exchange rate for wan was 4 thousand to the dollar. On the black market, the exchange rate ranged between 20 and 30 thousand to the dollar. If you paid for your laundry in wan, the bundle of money was often bigger than the bundle of laundry. The Motor Sgt. solved this problem by dealing in quantities of wan rather than notes. Saved a lot of counting. He had acquired a bunch of bushel baskets and bought and sold by the bushels of money instead of individual wan notes. He had shelving in his office stacked with 15 to 20 bushel baskets full of money. I once pointed out that many of the notes in the baskets were hundreds not thousands, which were the largest notes Korea printed at the time. He replied, “It don’t make all that much difference.”
When the official exchange rate went from 4 to 6 thousand wan to the dollar, the black market rate went crazy. I stopped in for coffee and found the Motor Sgt working on his books with a stubby pencil. “I really took a hit with this new exchange rate,” he said. “Near as I can recon, I lost about 6 bushel.”
I left Korea after spending 18 months in country. I was transferred to Japan. My orders got all screwed up along the way and I wound up in an Infantry Division up near the town of Hachinohe in Northern Honshu. Happenings like that are so trite they are not worth the telling.
I’ll end this series with a note plagiarized from The Wise Bamboo.
“This series of diaries is not meant to prove anything to anyone. I have recorded events as I remember them happening. If someone chooses to remember them differently, I have no quarrel with them.”
THE END